


those ghost of yours

by celticdrum



Category: Super Junior, Super Junior-M
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 21:25:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1362280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celticdrum/pseuds/celticdrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ghosts aren't just imprints of the living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	those ghost of yours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unicornologist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornologist/gifts).



> This was kind of hard for me to write, as I usually don't write Qmi in canon. Hope I didn't screw up much!

Kyuhyun remembers the first time he saw it, some kind of shadow on the hallway of the hospital ward. He also remembers thinking how he thought he was hallucinating, the after effects from having been lying on the hospital bed for too long. The nurse who was in charge of him at that time sort of agreed with him, because the hospital is a mysterious place, she said. People come and go, some people come but go somewhere else, some people never leave—it was just natural for Kyuhyun to be seeing things. 

“But you know,” she continued, “if you're scared of things you could see, what about those you couldn't?”

Kyuhyun didn't really dwell on it, because a few days after he first saw it, the manager told him that a birthday party was immediately cancelled on the day the accident happened. 

 

 

Though of course, Kyuhyun is actually scared of many things, only not as much as Zhoumi fears cockroaches. 

“Ewww,” he squeals as he jumps to a table, nearly hitting the ceiling when Kyuhyun stays over to study one day. “Take it away, take it away, take it away!”, he shouts, as though repeatedly wishing it gone would actually do the trick. Of course, it doesn't. A cleaning lady happens to be around and she stomps her slipper on the creature, squashing it flat (Kyuhyun thinks, he doesn't get to see it up close) and it's 2 hours before Kyuhyun can start studying again. 

“I'm going to sleep soon,” Zhoumi yawns after ending the phone call with his mother. “Do you still need anything? Hot coffee? Or just me?” 

Sometimes he's worse than Donghae, but he isn't really far from truth. Studying in Zhoumi's dorm gives him the kind of peace he needs, away from the rest of the drama-watching gang and away from people who would argue at the slightest things. The worst Zhoumi could get is crying while watching Taiwanese dramas or Mainland movies and Kyuhyun would always prefer the kind of noise from languages that he wouldn't be able to understand right away. 

“Not you, at least for now,” he says to Zhoumi. A space in your bed might be nice, he wants to say, but he knows that Zhoumi reserves a space for him even without him having to say it. 

 

 

Zhoumi isn't like Hankyung. 

Hankyung was the quiet big brother, speaks a little like the naggy cleaning auntie. Kyuhyun-ah, eat this, this is good for you, this makes you feel better, you gotta take care of yourself, he used to often say. You needed to know his way around him, find the route to his weakness and let him embrace you. 

“ _Hyung_ , are you mine?” He asked him twice, once during broadcast, once on a cold snowy Beijing night. 

“Stop—don't joke,” Hankyung had replied playfully, first with Chinese, then with Korean. 

He only asked Zhoumi the same question once, a few days after he asked Hankyung. Zhoumi didn't hesitate. Because Zhoumi is the affectionate big brother and he finds a way to your heart with his mismatched eyes sparkling through dark shadows. 

“Of course, Guixian,” he had said, calling him by a name he wouldn't stumble on. He said it so easily, perhaps because he didn't really understand the question, or perhaps he was just that nice, Kyuhyun didn't ask, didn't have to. 

After all, it was a question asked when Guixian hardly spoke Chinese and when the little Korean that Jomi spoke was only enough to speak to elementary students.

It had felt good somehow, knowing that the answer was spoken in some kind of mutual agreement, _I'll take care of you_ for _I'll depend on you._

That night, he slept beside him and pulled a little more blanket to his side. 

 

 

Zhoumi wakes him up with the smell of freshly-baked tuna sandwiches. 

“Are you preparing for something?” Zhoumi asks, eyes firm on the computer, probably reading the online Chinese newspaper. 

“Yes,” Kyuhyun replies. His first presentation is due soon, and since Zhoumi is asking, he probably talked in his sleep. 

“Eat up,” Zhoumi says, then stands up to pick up his wallet and keys and gives Kyuhyun a quick hug. “I'm heading to the company, see you later.”

At times like this Kyuhyun wonders if Zhoumi has some kind of ghost hanging around, the one that struggles to accept that he might not have really belonged to anything in Korea. The one that reminds him that his base is not really his purpose, and the one that said that he's never really seen with people he had given his blood, sweat and tears for. 

Like the kind of ghost that Kyuhyun saw a few years back in the hospital, the one that never fails to remind him that he was _that_ close to losing himself. 

 

 

Kyuhyun sees Zhoumi a week later, when he finally gets another night free for his undergraduate projects. 

“I wrote another song today,” Zhoumi announces in a familiar song that Kyuhyun has heard multiple times over the years. 

“Really?” 

“Yes, actually I got Henry to pass me a rejected demo that he was working on with Gen, then Ryeowook twisted it a bit here and there, and now that it sounded like an actual song, I thought I'd write something.”

“Can I see?”

Zhoumi lets a little laugh. “You won't even understand it, it's in Chinese.” 

“I might!” Kyuhyun exclaims. It's not an exaggeration—sometimes he _could_ , a little, understand the words spoken in dramas without having to read the Korean subtitles. Sometimes he feels like Zhoumi forgets that Korean children get some basic Hanja education, and Kyuhyun still could recognise important Hanjas. It's true that Zhoumi knows his level of Chinese best—then again Zhoumi rather understands a lot of things about him best—but Kyuhyun is never static. If there's anything about growing up in a family of educators, it is knowing that people should never stop learning. 

“Alright,” Zhoumi says, and he hands him the worn-out planner he got from Starbucks last year which he uses to write songs in, ghosts of his rejected creations. 

“To be honest, it's more or less like the song I wrote a few weeks back,” he says. Kyuhyun knows what this means. It means that whatever song that Zhoumi wrote a few weeks back, it wasn't ok-ed by the company producer and got shafted into the draft folder, it means that that's yet another song that wouldn't see the light of day, probably ever, it means that another ghost just got created. 

 

 

Henry once said jokingly in an after-concert party that being him meant having a lot of spare time to mess around and they had all laughed. 

Kyuhyun knows better—it also means more time to be haunted. 

 

 

The annual medical check-ups could be such nightmares. They remind Kyuhyun of Donghae telling him how his father begged and begged for his throat to be spared, they remind him of Eunhyuk's strangled prayers, they remind him that he knew how it was like to be a robot, they remind him that his accident happened on Zhoumi's birthday, and they remind him of how things that happened after the accident were just the beginning of all the ghosts he would eventually see, because ghosts aren't just imprints of the living, they are what were left clinging after dreams were shattered. 

 

 

Donghae often says that they need to visit Henry in Toronto someday, making Henry brim in puppy-like eagerness whenever he hears it. Henry loves Donghae a lot, and not just because Donghae wants to go to Toronto. Henry to Donghae is a little like Eunhyuk to Donghae: they have parts of Donghae's soul in them. 

 

 

When Kyuhyun said to Zhoumi when they landed in Taiwan for their long stay in Mandarin, “I'll be in your care,”, Zhoumi laughed. 

“I'm not a Taiwanese, I'm a foreigner here just like you.” 

 

 

Zhoumi speaks a lot more Korean now than he did when they first met, when he didn't even know how to say that he was hungry and the rice in his bowl wasn't enough. Still, they met when the common language between them was spoken with eyes and perhaps that was what Heechul meant when he once said that Hankyung understood him better than people who spoke the same language as him. 

Perhaps this was also why he believes that Zhoumi saw the ghost that lingered around in the ward where he stayed. Because Zhoumi has them too, and Zhoumi has a lot of them. 

“Good things will happen to people who wait,” he says when Kyuhyun passes him back the Starbucks planner with his newly-written lyrics. 

Zhoumi's an increditbly strong person—to assume him to be anything less would be insulting. 

 

 

Kyuhyun still sees them in his sleep, those shadows, even when he finally understands where they came from. They have been around for the longest time, sometimes there, sometimes not, sometimes more pronounced, sometimes misty and grainy. 

“Are you my Zhoumi?” he asks again a few days after he graduates, staying over in Zhoumi's dorm because he can.

As expected, he only laughs. 

“What is this question? Do you need me to buy you some wine?”

“You didn't answer,” Kyuhyun says. This time, they are on equal grounds. No need to read beyond spoken words. 

“I thought I answered that a few years back?”

Zhoumi is a lot of things: sometimes he's dumb and naïve, sometimes he's hopelessly hopeful, sometimes he's romantic, sometimes he's too nice to people who jeered at him, sometimes he's too cheeky with boys who were in gossip columns with him, sometimes he's diplomatic when he phrases things during interviews, sometimes he's a master in hiding his own ghosts, but he has never lied to Kyuhyun. 

“I forgot what you answered,” he says as he flops on to the bed. 

“Go sleep and remember,” Zhoumi answers as he applies a facial mask on his face, ready to sleep too.


End file.
